As we noted last week, Congress screwed up the language of their health care bill at their own expense. But, thanks to Obama administration lawyers, members and their immediate personal staff might be able to keep their existing health insurance coverage — for now. The problem, as Heritage and others noted, is that the bill’s language says they have legislated themselves out of their own coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and into the newly created health insurance exchanges they’re imposing on the states. Without the timely …
“I think there are many good arguments that you can make for a value added tax or a consumption tax, as opposed to a tax on wages” said National Commission on Fiscal Reform Co-Chairman Erskine Bowles on April 25 during a joint appearance with Co-Chair Alan Simpson on Fox News. This is a chilling statement both for what it says about tax burdens and what it says about tax reform. One of the most poorly kept secrets in Washington is that the President’s so-called debt commission is supposed to find …
Today President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will convene for the first time at the White House. Tasked with making recommendations to Congress that would put the budget in primary balance by 2015 and “meaningfully improve” our nation’s long-term fiscal outlook, the commission meets a little over a month after Congress approved a new $2.5 trillion health care entitlement that the Obama administration now confirms will increase our nation’s total health care spending. This is a now familiar pattern for the White House: first enact record …
Sen. Christopher Dodd insists that his financial reform bill is aimed at Wall Street companies. But USAA, the well-known financial-services company for members of the U.S. military and their families, is worried that it will wind up caught in the Dodd bill dragnet. In a rare move, USAA CEO Joe Robles recently sent an email to each of its members, asking them to contact their representatives in Washington and urge them to make a certain change to the Dodd bill. Specifically, Robles hopes to amend the portion of the bill …
School choice is on the march in Illinois. And if the Rev. Senator James Meeks (D-15) has his way, 22,000 children stand to gain a lifeline out of failing public schools in the Prairie State. Senator Meeks introduced the school choice bill, which passed out of the Senate in March. Last Thursday, the Illinois House Executive Committee approved the measure, and the legislation now awaits action any day in the full House. A press release from the Illinois Policy Institute lauded the school choice bill: “‘The highest-quality research is clear …
Special interest handouts are not a pretty sight. Perhaps that is why lawmakers buried their latest one inside the bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. Unfortunately putting handouts out of sight does not make them any better for the economy. At issue is the fierce competition between FedEx and the United Parcel Service (UPS) in the package delivery business. While UPS must collectively bargain with the Teamsters, FedEx remains union free. FedEx has avoided the costs of collective bargaining primarily by keeping its employees satisfied without union representation. Fortune magazine …
Addressing The Question of Global Warming, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson recently wrote in The New York Review of Books: There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. … Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. As if trying to prove Dyson’s point, the Associated Press reported last week: First, …
The Wall Street Journal reports that Barack Obama’s favorite capitalist, Warren Buffet, is seeking an exemption from Obama-endorsed derivatives rules for his insurance-and-everything conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway. Derivatives are risk-shifting financial contracts that Buffet infamously described as “weapons of financial mass destruction.” After the 2008 financial crisis, Buffet decided to join the nuclear club and Berkshire has amassed a $63 billion derivatives portfolio. At issue is a proposed new rule in the Senate financial reform legislation requiring everyone who buys, sells, or trades derivatives to post collateral: cash or cash equivalents …
During the debate on and after the Obama economic stimulus bill even some conservative economists were arguing the bill was needed to stabilize the economy. Similar arguments followed every successive “jobs bill” Congress has enacted, despite the growing embarrassment of self-indictment implied by these bills. It appears the economics profession may have relearned a lesson According to the latest survey of its members by the National Association of Business Economists: The vast majority (73%) of respondents reported the fiscal stimulus enacted in February 2009 has had no impact on employment …
President Barack Obama’s favorite rhetorical device is to lecture the American people about what are and are not “legitimate” public policy arguments. So throughout the health care debate, President Obama insisted that it was “not legitimate” to claim that “a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system.” This despite the fact that Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and Nobel Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman were all caught on video explaining to single-payer advocates that the public option was …
